


up the water spout

by gogollescent



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-30 09:15:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1016829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I have written some weirdass shortfic on my tumblr and I am determined to archive ALL of it. For the prompt, "Nanami wakes up thinking she has a spider in her throat."</p>
            </blockquote>





	up the water spout

When she wakes up, it’s lurking in the part of her esophagus that’s level with her sternum, like it’s perched on the very precipice of being digestible. Or something. She’s no arachnologist! But its presence makes her think of the vagueness in her gut, below the diaphragm—there’s so much sensation even in the lungs of a person, thin planks of muscle and nerves that net meat, the possibility of a sigh, or of holding your breath: and then nothing beyond but the belly’s rind of skin. A numb cavity, filled with organs whose names she doesn’t know, performing unimaginable labors.

So that’s where the spider is: at the edge of all feeling, sharp-footed and hard. She sits up, putting a fist between her breasts and pressing in, and to her horror it crawls away from the external threat. Not toward her stomach, but up, just a few centimeters, so that she thinks if you cut into her heart the knife might snick off one leg of the spider. How terrible! How strange, to think of a loathsome pest living in her, eating perhaps of anything she swallows, and yet capable of surviving so many of the ways she could die: a bullet to the head, or a noose, or a sword emerging from the scabbard of her ribs. Perhaps only arsenic would take the spider with her. Perhaps, Nanami thinks, I can knock it out of me—but she has a vision of the spider fleeing the dull upward blows of her hand, like a soldier through an underground tunnel at the end of the world, only to stop when it reached her mouth—to perch and make a last stand on her tongue. And what would she do then? Chew it, brush it, drown it in suds? She has a vision of herself going to the school nurse, and asking for treatment, the spider hitched to her tongue like a jewel; and the school nurse says,  _Evil! Evil!_ and makes her write a hundred lines of “I will not house arachnids in my infernal maw!”

Slowly, she drops her hand. “Help,” she whispers. The spider climbs another ticklish inch.

…

"Nanami," says Anthy, green eyes gentle above the hygiene mask. Nanami doesn’t even want to know what she’s done to the dentist. "Nanami, open wide."

"Never!" says Nanami, which is her one mistake. Anthy slides tongs deftly between her closing teeth, and forces her jaws apart. "Hmmm," she says, ignoring Nanami’s plaintive gurgles. "What have we here?"

And she pulls out a rosebud, pink as dawn.


End file.
